How Much Do You Know about Xenia Emulator?
Today our choice of topic is Xenia, a project which focuses on emulating games from the original Xbox’s library. This project started off with a discontinued project started off with a discontinued version of the Xenia emulator, only able to play 5 games out of the entire library. Starting all the way back in 2002, it proved that it was possible to emulate Xbox games on the PC.
After its discontinuation, a user by the name of Luke Usher made an attempt-t to revive the project. This fork of the original, called Xenia-Reloaded, is the one that’s the most widely available on the net today. It boasts a larger amount of compatible games than the original Xenia, as well as other quality of life features that make it much friendlier to use. As of now, nearly 16% of the Xbox’s total library of games are fully playable, with 49.22% still having issues which prevent full completion of the game.
They host a website where you can check out which games are compatible with the emulator and submit bug reports. They also have a Github project page where you can see the various features that are available, as well as various optimisations that users can enable for higher frame rates and increased performance. They also have a Discord server where you can ask questions and contribute to their ongoing game compatibility tests. Lastly, they have a Patreon page where you can help support their ongoing endeavours to improve the emulator further.
Contributors are highly welcomed by the team, with the project leads even releasing developer notes for those who want to improve on the current build. Speaking of which, they host different builds of Xenia-Reloaded on their website, as well as the dates when they were first released. The Github page also has special instructions for getting games to run on the emulator, along with how to extract the game data from the CDs itself and an FAQ page for the more commonly addressed problems. They also have a section for automated builds which lead to various pre-release builds and other unstable branches of the Xenia emulator.
Requirements
The current system requirements listed on their Github project page state that an operating system of Windows 7 or higher, specifically the 64-bit build, is required to run Xenia. Take note, however, that 32-bit systems will not be able to run Xenia due to incompatibility issues. Those using linux and other unix-based systems can use Wine to run Xenia on their PCs. This requires some extra work in order to get the emulator to up and running, so make sure to check out their official wiki for full instructions.
For video cards, users will need a GPU that comes with Direct3D 9.0c support. It must also have native compatibility with Pixel Shader Model 2.x and Vertex Shader Model 3.0. Other software requirements include Npcap for network emulation and a WinUSB compliant driver for plugging in Xbox controllers. Other requirements and information that may apply to you can be seen on their official wiki as well.
